Eric Adams Called Me a Plantation Owner for Defending Tenants

Jeanie Dubnau and Michael Hollingsworth are tenant organizers in New York City. They are part of the Rent Justice Coalition. In a viral video, New York City Mayor Eric Adams took issue with how Jeanie confronted him about rent increases, comparing her to a plantation owner.

Jeanie Dubnau

I have been a tenant organizer with the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association in Washington Heights, NYC, since the 1970s.

This community is mainly Latino, with most of the people coming from the Dominican Republic. It is a low-income community and the people who do have jobs work in low-paying jobs like home attendants.

This year and last, Mayor Eric Adams' Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) has imposed crushing rent increases which will inevitably result in evictions and more homelessness.

The Rent Stabilization Law states that the task of the RGB is to protect the public from unregulated profits, but mayor-appointed board members follow his lead in protecting landlords to the detriment of working-class tenants.

Last week I attended a meeting organized by our community board 12 at which Mayor Eric Adams was to "speak with the community" and I decided to go and criticize him for the recent outrageous rent increases passed by his Rent Guidelines Board.

The median household income in Northern Manhattan is $55,000 for a family of four, according to data firm AreaVibes. One-third of this income would be $1,529 per month, which is considered "affordable".

I asked Mayor Adams where a family of four can obtain a two-bedroom apartment for this amount of money.

Now, in addition to the 5 percent rent increase passed last year, this year the RGB passed a 3 percent for a one-year lease; a 2.75 percent for the first year; and a 3.2 percent for the second year of a two-year lease.

Every week, I meet tenants who simply can no longer pay their rent. These are hard-working folks, or retired seniors who are desperate to remain in their homes.

Instead of answering, Mayor Adams deflected and attacked, comparing me to a plantation owner.

My initial reaction to his plantation owner remark was amazement that he would say such a stupid thing. No one from his team apologized to me either at the meeting or since. I do not need any apology.

Since the event, I have had numerous texts and e-mails supporting me both from community people, friends and my family.

My message to the mayor now is simply—don't run for reelection, make way for someone who supports New Yorkers.

Michael Hollingsworth

I was appalled as I watched the video of Mayor Adams dressing down my colleague Jeanie, a long-time and well-respected tenant activist, because she dared to ask him why his hand-picked Rent Guidelines Board had raised rents for the second year in a row on more than two million New Yorkers.

His casting of Jeanie as a white Karen disrespecting a Black mayor was a clumsy attempt to use race as a way of skirting accountability and it is becoming a tired tactic by too many elected officials—especially when you consider that 76 percent of rent-stabilized tenants are non-white, per New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey data.

My parents were working-class tenants who were able to raise a family of eight in rent-stabilized housing, something that, given the trajectory of these increases, won't be possible for many families moving forward.

It's one of the reasons I joined NYC's housing movement eight years ago as a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union.

I saw firsthand how the decisions made by elected officials at both the state and local levels have decimated neighborhoods like Northern Crown Heights, which lost 19,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020, four of those years with Eric Adams representing parts of the neighborhood as State senator.

As much as Adams would like to make this a black-and-white issue, it isn't. We're both New Yorkers bound by our desire to ensure working-class tenants can remain in this city.

Our coalition is the Rent Justice Coalition. We are a diverse coalition of tenants, advocacy groups, and organizers who have come together from all across the city, old, and young alike, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and non-denominational, Black, white, Hispanic, and Asian.

And we know the only color that matters to too many politicians is green.

Mayor Adams is no exception, shortly after his board raised rents on NY's rent-stabilized tenants in 2022 Adams, a landlord himself, raised $156,000 from people working in the real estate industry for his reelection bid.

One hand washes the other as the saying goes. Mayor Adams and his ilk should know that every day more and more New Yorkers are waking up to the insidious and parasitic nature between too many of our elected officials and big real estate.

And those of us who are fighting for a fairer NYC for renters won't be intimated or distracted by their shenanigans.

The housing crisis is not just a New York problem. It affects working people everywhere. Affordable housing must become a guaranteed right, along with education, food and medical care.

Leaving these human necessities to the vagaries of the market will do nothing but increase profits for the richest few. The only way to win what we need is through a powerful unified, national movement for human rights. Our task is to build such a movement.

All views expressed in this article are the authors' own.

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